Becoming Human

David Harvey once evoked an observation attributed to Antonio Gramsci nearly a century ago: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.” Whereas Gramsci orients toward political possibility, Harvey appears resigned to the existential reality of a hegemonic condition. This essay proposes a third formulation that embraces both Harvey’s acceptance of a dominant reality and a Gramscian stance toward possibility. That is, the dominant world is dying, and now is the time for monsters: relationships, ideas, projects, and happenings that do not fit within the confines of capitalist modernity. Drawing from diverse-economies scholarship and pluriversal and decolonial theory and practice, this essay positions capitalism as a symptomatic feature of the broader condition of modernity: a dominant dying reality being kept alive in part through libidinal investments and aspirations. An emancipatory politics should thus advance “monstrous” ways of being, able to transgress capitalist modernity.